Follow the Leader or Follow the Masses? Part 2

Peer Pressure

Solomon Asch, a well known Gestalt psychologist, was interested in looking at social pressure or conformity in groups and what it does to human behaviour. He eventually came up with an experiment known as the Asch Paradigm in the 1950s. The experiment was simple. Participants were asked to look at 3 vertical lines on the right and find out which of these lines is the same length to the line on the left. When these trials were done individually, 99% of participants provided the correct answer. However, in a group setting, the accuracy of correct responses dramatically decreased. The group experiment is set up as follows. The experimenter takes a cluster of people and lines everyone up. You, the participant, are placed at the very end of the line. The trick here is that there is only 1 participant in the room and everyone else are confederates. These confederates pretend to be participants but are actually in on the experiment. The experimenter then goes down the line and asks everyone for their answer. All of the confederates purposely give the wrong answer. When it is the participant’s turn to reply, 75% of people would agree with everyone else in the room, even though they know it’s the incorrect answer.

Why do people give into peer pressure? Humanistic psychologist, Abraham Maslow, explains this in his theory of Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow’s theory can be visually represented as a pyramid. The third tier on the pyramid is our need for attachment. Maslow believes that this is an important need as it helps create self-esteem. People need to a have a sense of belonging. This feeling of acceptance and being valued by others is also defined as conditions of worth by Carl Rogers. This may be the reason why contestants on the show were more likely to listen to the audience.

Uncertainty

When faced with a difficult task, we are often more likely to ask others for advice. Solomon has tested many variations of the Asch Paradigm, one of which was by increasing the level of task difficulty. He did this by making the differences of line length smaller. He found that these tasks produced a greater amount of conformity among participants. Game show contestants may have made their decisions by listening to the audience because they were unsure of what to do.

Reward

What if contestants were playing for something on the show? Going back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the simple answer for the contestant’s actions may be because they need the prize money to purchase a home or pay off debts. This is related to tiers 1 and 2, which are physiological needs and safety needs.

Another reason that can tie into this is operant conditioning. This is a form of learning devised by Burrhis Frederic Skinner, where behaviour is affected by its consequences. The behaviour exhibited by the contestants is known as positive reinforcement, where the frequency of an action increases when it is followed by a positive outcome. In this case, contestants are more likely to shock players if they receive positive feedback such as cheering from the audience or an increase in prize money.